by James Hawes
—We’re getting pretty tight for time, Tony.
—Toni?
—I paid him four hundred euros.
—Now look, George …
—Four hundred, Toni?
—I was going to tell you, George.
—Toni, you watch. Gerry, you fucking bastard, you give me more one hundred fifty euros right now or you not get off this fucking shooting range. I kick your ass good. I shoot your fucking tyres out. Then we talk, you, me, Karel. Toni, I sorry, so sorry, this fucking bastard say you pay him two hundred fifty euros; is seventy-five for me, seventy-five for Karel for range, hundred for him. This is normal price for two English. Four hundred? Very nice for Gerry. So now I take his wallet. I am no thief, Toni. I do only what is make thing right. I take this fifty, you see? Fifty. Food for my kids, you see? Now you get one hundred back, I think that fair. You think that fair, Toni?
—George, no, you keep it.
—Toni, no.
—Yes, yes, please, George. For your kids.
—Toni, you are good man. I keep fifty of this, I give Karel fifty. You come back here tomorrow, next day, we do very good shoot, nothing for me, seventy-five for Karel range. I give you ammo what it cost me, maybe thirty, forty, nothing more to pay for you. We do really good course. I show you all US Marine tactics, very important. You want to do night-sight shoot? Yes, of course. So we can do night-sight shoot, at six o’clock is dark enough. You will like this, I promise. Karel has very good night-sights. For you and me nothing extra; a hundred extra for anyone other. You see, I am your friend, not Gerry. Now you know me, fuck Gerry. You call me, here is my card, my number also here my mobile, you see? I pick you up, thirty euros here and back to Prague. This is very fair price. We shoot, we talk like friends. You see? Fuck Gerry.
George gave Gerry what looked like quite a harmless little shove but which sent him tumbling backwards into a deep and very middle-European ditch.
—Um, look, George, the thing is, I need to get to the train station. Sort of now.
—Yes, of course, I know this. I take you. No problem. Plenty time. We go?
—Right, yes, George. We go.
56: God Knows
I feel that for the avoidance of doubt I should stress one thing: I did not want to have sex with George.
Not in the least. If he had proposed sex (George? Impossible!) I would have been horribly disappointed. I wanted things which are far more important than sex to us men. I wanted to drink with him. I wanted to drive with him. I wanted to talk with him, and agree with him and him to agree with me. I wanted to swap stories with him and find that, despite all the obviously vast differences in our lives, there was a strange undertow of fated congruity. I wanted to go looking for girls with him and wake up in the morning and go and have a big breakfast with him and talk about the girls before arranging to meet and drink with him again in a couple of days. I wanted his son (who was ten) to be friends with Jack and William for life. I wanted his daughter (who was nine) to marry one of them. I wanted to be as near as possible to him. No: I wanted to be as near as possible him. Not to his cock. To him. I wanted to be his blood brother. I wanted a formal alliance with him, for ever.
Anyone who has a fully grown personality won’t understand this.
Most men will.
As George’s old Passat circled the could-be-anyplace outskirts of Prague, I found myself no longer caring where we were going. Just being with him made me feel safe. It was like riding at night in my parents’ car, a tired child. The reassuring voice, the soft illumination of the dashboard, the washes of meaningless lamplight passing in the dark outside, the cool glass of the window on my cheek and …
—Ow! Sorry. Sorry, George, what was that you were saying? Sorry, I just, I’m so sleepy! Sorry, that was so rude.
—No no, Toni, I see you are tired. I know combat fatigue, this is like this. I think you are too tired for train. You stay in my house, I have bed for you.
—George, that’s so kind of you, but I can’t. I have to go to Berlin. There’s a man there who is very important for my life. If I don’t go, I’ll be in big trouble.
—Toni, please, now I ask you tell truth to me, your friend. I see you shoot. I see you watch. I think you are man in big trouble now.
—Yes, you’re right, George. I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m not going to Berlin, I’m going to Dresden. Look, I’m not even called Tony, but I’m not going to tell you my real name. Not now, anyway. But …
I took off my absurd cap and felt my hair fall down again at last. Before I could stop myself, I was telling the truth, at long last. It felt so good that I wanted to cry with happiness. And, somehow, the fact that I had to tell it all in simple English made it even more of a liberation.
—This is me, George. I have an Armalite at home in England. That’s why I needed to learn about it.
—I think Armalite is not legal in England, Toni?
—No, very illegal. Exactly. George, I found it, in my garden. I was planting plum trees, that’s all.
—Yes, plum trees, very nice.
—And it was just, there. I wasn’t sure what to do. I did nothing, then it got too late. I thought if I told the police I might get into trouble. I tried to dump it, but I ran into these bad people and I had to cock it, and so now it’s loaded and I was too scared to touch it again so I came to you. Now I can make it safe again, and then throw it away. Thank you.
—This is all very foolish, Toni.
—I know, I know, obviously, I should have just called the police right away, but, you see, well, England’s changed and …
—You throw your Armalite away? You give it to the police? Why?
—Sorry?
—No, Toni! I come to England, I get it, if you do not wish have it. Your Armalite is very valuable thing. In my little car is very easy. Maybe they check me when I drive in. Oho, Muslim from Bosnia, quick check him: I understand this, is not their fault. But aha! No big checks for a little car coming out from England! No, of course not. Why? Who takes an Armalite out of England into France? Ha ha!
—Look, um, Toni, I really don’t think that …
—Oh, of course, I am joking, Toni.
—Oh good. Ha. God, sorry, George, I’m so tired, I really thought for a minute there that you actually meant, you know, that you were going to come over and …
—I would not take it from you, Toni. I am your friend. It is yours.
—What?
—God has given you this thing. Lucky man, you must keep it. Tomorrow or next day we do night shoot and I teach you all maintenance you need. I give you genuine US Army kit for cleaning and such.
—George, I mean, look, thanks, wow, that’s really kind of you, but you see, like I said, it’s illegal just to have it at all, in England. Very, very illegal. And, you know, what would I ever do with it?
—Nothing, if God wants.
—Well, right then. Exactly.
—But maybe God wants other things, who knows, Toni?
—Um …
—Toni, we are friends. I tell you story. I am born, you know, in a country Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia government, army, money, flag, police, school, passport, all things. Not such bad police like Russia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany. No Red Army. Nice beaches. German girls in summer! Yes, of course, police. Yes, of course, government. Yes, of course, picture of Tito on all walls. Oh so nice. We salute if we like or if we not like, hello Tito we love you so much, all this shit, yes? But anyway. People know what they do, what happens. You do this, this happen, you do that, that happen. So you know. You say yes this, yes that, when you know is bullshit, you must do thing some asshole tell you because he got big friends, but you live. You make things little, little better, every year. You can maybe build new house, like my father build. And you do not need Armalite in this house, what for you need? Then one day all change. No country, no police except bad police, no army except bad army, tanks, guns, your new house shot down, your friends killed, no chance in safe haven, thank you,
United Nations. Oh yes, very nice. Thank you, Germany and France and Britain. So then you wish God you had Armalite in your house, then you kill the bastards before they kill you.
—George. I’m so sorry for all that. Yes, we should have stopped it. I understand. But you know, that isn’t going to happen in England.
—Toni, I know you are clever man, I think maybe you are too tired for think, poor you. If you never touch this Armalite again, you are never be in trouble, I am right? You keep it safe, it does nothing, yes?
—I suppose.
—Of course. Not suppose. So this is very good, this mean you have a good life. You win, happy man. England is England, nothing has changed, your house is safe, you leave your Armalite to your boys for if they need it, you never need to shoot anyone, you die happy and people sing round your bed. God give us peace in our days. But if you need it, Toni, aha! Then you are damn glad it is bloody there. And you are not scared make trouble with police and such, because there is fucking bloody great big trouble already, this is why you need to get your Armalite, yes?
—Well, that’s logical, yes.
—Yes, very logical. Now you think better, Toni. When this day come, if it come, God knows, if you need to get your Armalite but it is not there because you threw it away. For what? For nothing. On that day you curse yourself, you tear your face, stupid Toni, you say stupid me, I throw away my Armalite for nothing and so now my house will be taken, or my daughter will be robbed or my sons will die like rabbits. No, Toni. Think good. You keep your Armalite, you win or you win. You throw it away, maybe you win, maybe you lose. So you keep it, or you are silly man.
—Yes, I suppose you’re right, I … No, George, sorry, look, this is crazy. England is England. We’ve got the English Channel. No one’s invaded us for a thousand years, well, apart from the Scots, and that doesn’t really count. No one’s had their money stolen by the government since the seventeenth century. That’s why Russian billionaires put their money into London. Nothing like that is ever going to happen in England. It couldn’t.
—Toni, I am sad you speak like a fool. I have told you my life. Does man know what things will come? No. God knows.
57: What Things Will Come
I looked into his dark eyes. He was speaking the pure truth as he knew it, as he had learned it. And as I looked at his truth, all of sudden I seemed to see other truths.
My parents’ truth, for example. They had been right to bring me up as they had done, as right as anyone can be. In the world they knew as normal, the world they had come of age in, accountants were book-keepers, professional footballers ended up running pubs if they were lucky and university lecturers lived in big houses and wore tweed. Those had been hard, provable facts. All around them, as the fifties turned into the sixties, they had seen grammar-school people who had gone to university making hay in fat state or quasi-governmental jobs while country houses were being sold off for peanuts to pay taxes. They had not been stupid. They had been observant and wise and had seen what worked. They had done the right and rational thing. They had loved me and done the best for me and they had, in consequence, readied me perfectly for life in the world of JFK and Harold Wilson. Everything had changed, that was all. The hard facts had turned out to be as soft and floppy as Dali’s watches. Like some Ice Age cave family faced with the melting of the glaciers, they had found that all their precious survival lore was suddenly quite worthless. They had equipped me, their only son, with all the tricks they knew: but they were all just tools for a vanished world.
And what would clever I do, in my turn?
My sons and my daughter, assuming no dirty terrorist bomb or melting ice caps or Sino-American nuke-fest got them first, would do jobs, assuming there were any left, which did not yet even exist, assuming the world continued to do so. Who knew? How would they, as grown people, see my world? Would they look back at this world, our world, now, as a paradise wilfully thrown away or as a fool’s paradise waiting to get it? What great event would finally bring down the curtain on the longest post-war boom and the Pax Americana? Whatever, it was a safe bet my sons and daughter would not be coming respectfully to me for advice on life when they were twenty-five.
Money, yes.
Except that I would have none.
On the other hand, if all went well with the world, my boys and my sweet daughter might pre-order the genders of my grandchildren in advance, straight or gay, in twenty or thirty years’ time, engineering them free of faults. By 2050, or whatever it would be by then, they, my own children, might be able to download their entire minds and conquer death itself at last.
I might be part of the lucky, spoiled post-war boom-time West that had never had it so good and never would again, or I might belong to the tragicomic last generation that would ever have to die. In the tortured decades between approximately 1870 and 2050, men had lost their belief in God but still had to die. The result was Auschwitz and Wal-Mart, discuss …
—I think you understand, Toni?
I looked deeper into George’s war-zone eyes and saw the skies of London darkened by the Luftwaffe, the roads of Europe crammed with refugees. I saw the unspeakable cattle trucks heading for the unthinkable, packed with people who still found it all unbelievable. I saw my own mother at ten years old, throwing herself to the ground in a little street in Cricklewood as an unseen V-1 choked off above the low clouds. My father, a teenage conscript, pouring heavy machine-gun fire into masses of Chinese infantry at point-blank range on a hillside in Korea until his machine-gun barrel jammed, expecting to die by bayonet until the last-ditch US air strikes incinerated a thousand more Chinese teenagers in clouds of napalm. Myself newly born, asleep in a West Country garden in a high old pram as the vapour trails of the V-bombers and B-52s embroidered the skies, ready in the air lest the Russian ships did not turn back from Cuba that day. The huge lorries, as rectangular and lumpish as cheap green plastic toys, hauling cruise missiles through English lanes. The mechanic rushing out of the country garage in Ireland where I had just pulled in to fill up, shouting to everyone that Kiev had been nuked, that Reagan had actually gone and fucking done it, and everyone on that little forecourt looking immediately skywards, triggered by a lifetime’s drip-fed fear, to watch powerlessly for the MIRVs. The Berlin Wall falling and my career going up in smoke along with a generation of certainties. The hellfires of 9/11, of 7/7, of rush-hour Madrid. The face of a teenage boy gunned down last week not half a mile from our front door for dissing someone by text. The mortgage rate hitting 15 per cent again as whole continents of ice toppled booming into fish-stripped seas and entire nations went marching for food and oil and even water …
What happens next, in our time? Our children’s time?
George was right: God knows.
58: Erbyerk Again
—Perhaps you’re right, I said at last.
—Yes. Toni, you have ammo too?
—What? Um, yes, actually. Yes. Half a dozen, um, clips.
—It is still OK?
—I don’t know. How should I know?
—You should try it.
—That might be rather difficult, in England.
—Toni, you can go to the forests or the mountains.
—Well, the thing is, we don’t have forests and mountains, in England. We hardly even have proper countryside, these days.
—A country without forests and mountains? I did not know. Well, is possible to know pretty good if ammo is OK without you shoot it. Tomorrow I show how you know.
—Right. So, I mean, look, George, you seriously think I should just keep it safe and, and …
—Safe and oiled. I think serious. We are men, Toni. Men must think serious. You keep it safe and oiled, Toni, you win or you win. Is very good situation for you. This is my opinion. So, here is Holesovice Station. You have not much time, sorry I talk so much but I think it important. I hope you come back, tomorrow, next day.
—Yes, George. I will.
—So, we hug, you go Germany.
—Right. Oof! Yes. I go Germany.
—You call me tomorrow, Toni. We are friends.
Oh, the balm of that word. Someone who would stand by me even in gunfire. A friend in the cold playground of life. I wanted to get George to England, find him work, place his children in good schools, help him buy a house in our street. Perhaps there were places we could go, in Wales or Scotland, to hike like boys again and fire off our little Armalites in innocent safety before cooking sausages and beans on fires of twigs and settling smiling down to sleep right under the stars, with no one to want a thing from us, far from all mortgages. Perhaps if the VIP went really, really well, if I got the TV series, or maybe if I won the lottery this weekend, I could make all this happen, this simple life? How much would I need to pay George to have him just come over and live in the little cottage in my big garden and just, well, look after things for me?
—George, if anything goes wrong, I mean, if I can’t actually get back from Dresden in time tomorrow …
—Nothing is certain, Toni. Hope is all we have.
—Well yes, I suppose. So if I can’t make it tomorrow, I’ll get over again soon. Really, I will.
—Yes, you must. I am here. Toni, please I have one favour ask you. If we do not meet tomorrow, if you go back to England now, when you come back again soon, you can bring me some little things from England?
—Of course, George!
—You can bring me Manchester United shirt for my little Jan? Number eleven, with ‘Jan’ on it?
—Absolutely no problem. Jan, number eleven.
—And if you can, please, some DVDs of Erbyerk?
—Sorry?
—You do not know him, Toni? Oh, you must learn. Is very funny English man, many times when we with British Army boys from Gloucestershire we watch DVDs and laugh so much, ha ha ha, yes, I remember! ‘Erby say: do not watch if easily offended!’ Yes, this warning was true, ha ha!
59: The Shock Outrunning All Pain
